Is It an Employer’s Duty to Educate Its Interns/Co-ops?

Is it an employer’s responsibility to provide its interns and co-ops with honest assessments of how their lines of work may fare economically—both in the present and in future years?

According to NACE’s 2017 Internship & Co-op Report, nearly half of responding employers agree—including 16 percent that do so strongly—that it is their responsibility to be a source of this information for their interns and co-ops. (See Figure 1.)

On a five-point scale, employers were asked to what degree they agreed or disagreed with the statement that they provided their interns and/or co-ops “with information about the economic outlook of their field of study, their prospective job positions, and [their] organization’s industry.”

The percentage that neither agreed nor disagreed with this statement—30.8 percent—was equal to the percentage that agreed.